What do you use for site coding, FTP, and file management? Suggestions?

by headShrinker on 11/14/2009, 6:05 PM with 35 comments

I use Dreamweaver and hate it. It's bloated and slow, it has far too many features that I never use. Basically I am looking for code-coloring/view, file management and FTP. What are you using?

  • by matthewking on 11/14/2009, 6:33 PM

    (OSX) Textmate and Capistrano, aside from that I usually SCP files but if I have to use FTP I use Transmit.

    Use source control such as GIT, commit your work then its as easy as 'cap deploy' to send it to the server, no messing with files!

  • by aarongough on 11/14/2009, 6:46 PM

    Coda.

    Hands-down it's the best text-editor I've ever used. But it's also an FTP/SFTP client. And it'll integrate with your version control. And it will provide you with a local console/SHH, CSS editor & browser preview (if you are a web-developer) and a small reference library built-in to the app...

    In case you haven't noticed I really can't speak highly enough of Coda. And to make matters even better, if you have a bug: report it. Don't be surprised when you hear back from the developers the next day...

    http://www.panic.com/coda/

  • by Ixiaus on 11/15/2009, 6:56 PM

    Emacs

    Subversion

    Rsync

    -----------

    Emacs for a few general text editing tasks and all of my programming tasks (HTML, XML, PHP, Scheme, Python, etc...). I also use Subversion religiously and so should you (or any version control system); most editors/IDEs have some form of an integration plugin for VCS software to make it easy.

    I'm not a big fan of FTP. It works well for "little" things, like pushing images up to a web directory or transferring tarballs from server to server. For my web application projects I use rsync exclusively - I just have a little deployment script that I run and it takes care of pushing all the files up to production/development/sandbox wherever. Rsync will only move files that don't exist or are "different" from the source, so it is very efficient especially if you make changes to other files down the road so I don't have to hunt and peck for which file I changed or upload the entire project all over...

    Also, nothing beats a consistent, cogent, and lucid directory structure and file naming conventions. Clear thought process = clear work process.

  • by weaksauce on 11/14/2009, 8:20 PM

    (OSX) Textmate is a good text editor if you don't need wysiwyg editing. Coda might be a good alternative if you do.

    Cyberduck is a good ftp/ssh over ftp/file client.

    For sure use some form of source control to manage files. ( I don't care what you use just use something. Subversion is ok. Git and Mercurial are nice too.)

    My preferred method for updating a site is to checkout/clone from source control to a new location in your websites hierarchy and then create a soft link to the new directory. Scripts can automate this process.

    ln -si /var/www/mysitecheckedoutfromsourcecontrol /var/www/mysiterootsetupinwebserverconfig

    After that, If you have problems with the new site, you have a simple one line command to revert the site back to a known good point in time. All you have to do is relink it to the old site and you are off and running.

    ln -si /oldsitepath /var/www/mysitesetupinwebserver

  • by daleharvey on 11/14/2009, 6:16 PM

    emacs has a nasty learning curve but it is incredibly powerful and integrates very well with most languages. (im not religious, vi is probably just as suitable)

    I would also look into deploying your site via whatever vcs you use as opposed to through ftp, it forces you to keep everything inline

  • by akamaka on 11/14/2009, 7:11 PM

    When I'm working on Windows, SmartFTP is my favorite FTP client. Along with UltraEdit, it's one of the few commercial utilities that were worth paying for.

    You'd think that the free FTP utilities would be good enough, but SmartFTP has so much polish and so many small enhancements (especially when it comes to handling multiple connections, auto-resume, remote file editing, transfer queuing) that it blows everything else away.

    That being said, I'm still on version 2.0, while the current release is 4.0. I can't comment on how much better or worse it's gotten.

  • by aphistic on 11/14/2009, 9:47 PM

    I'm a huge fan of UltraEdit (http://www.ultraedit.com). I've been using it for years and I like the ability to browse any of my (S)FTP sites and make tweaks quickly. My main day to day work is in Visual Studio so I don't use it as my primary editor but when I do work on legacy ASP, PHP or any other kind of text (or binary) files I use UltraEdit. I'm especially happy because they just released the first version of UltraEdit for Linux (and soon OS X).

  • by olimay on 11/14/2009, 8:05 PM

    editor: vim FTP: FileZilla file management: combo of VCS rsync

    Editor: Substitute your favorite lightweight, powerful editor for vim. Emacs and textmate are good choices, I hear. I stuck with vim and am quite happy, because using the mouse or arrow keys feels like so much effort. I don't like the heavy meta key dependence of Emacs: most of the people I know who use Emacs have special keyboards, whereas I'm very comfortable using my notebook keyboard for vim. Haven't tried Textmate because I run Ubuntu, but Mac people give it a lot of praise.

    FTP: I actually use FTP very sparingly, mostly for clients that have no idea what a VCS is, or have FTP-only access to their server. If I just need to upload miscellaneous files, like images etc., I'll scp or rsync from a shell. But FileZilla is pretty good, and it's cross-platform.

    File Management: rsync for very large files (media stuff), giant tarballs, or stuff I don't like to keep in the VCS, like config files with secrets. Otherwise, I use whatever VCS is appropriate for the project, which is usually Subversion. I use Git when I have a choice.

  • by seldo on 11/14/2009, 6:48 PM

    I use Eclipse for all my editing.

    My deployment method is to commit to svn, then svn update on the server (plus a script to move the current live site to a backup location in case I need to roll back). This is faster than FTP and means I've never, ever launched code that I haven't committed. Even on a one-man project that's useful.

  • by aarongough on 11/14/2009, 7:09 PM

    +1 for Dreamweaver being awful. I have to use it so that the content editors at my workplace can use it too, but that doesn't stop me from wondering how on earth so many obvious bugs make it into the release version of Dreamweaver...

    Adobe, if you're listening at all, start again from scratch. Make something actually good!

  • by ronnier on 11/14/2009, 7:41 PM

    Combinations of Visual Studio, Notepad++, Team Foundation Server, Subversion, and FileZilla (all depending on which project I'm doing).

  • by ethan on 11/14/2009, 7:47 PM
  • by chrisbolt on 11/15/2009, 12:18 AM

    TextMate and Subversion, with a post-commit hook that updates a checked out copy on a staging server.

  • by vyrotek on 11/14/2009, 7:13 PM

    Visual Studio and the Publish button

  • by jacquesm on 11/14/2009, 9:11 PM

    ssh & vi, svn to keep me sane :)

    Call me old fahsioned...

    On a java project I work on I use intellij, and I hate every second of it. The amount of (external api) stuff to remember is simply too large to commit to memory though.

  • by icodemyownshit on 11/14/2009, 9:09 PM

    1. ssh access 2. Expandrive (mount ssh connection as a drive) 3. notepad++ or textmate

  • by mosheg101 on 11/14/2009, 9:20 PM

    PhpED has been my favorite environment for a while, although it is commercial.

  • by quickpost on 11/14/2009, 6:49 PM

    Textmate, Cyberduck, and SVN.

  • by dpcan on 11/14/2009, 8:13 PM

    editplus, fireftp, explorer

    Fireworks CS4 for graphics editing and splicing

  • by xsc on 11/14/2009, 7:19 PM

    Notepad++/Filezilla for SFTP

  • by souldoubt on 11/15/2009, 1:52 AM

    Coda, Transmit, OS Finder.

  • by joe_bleau on 11/14/2009, 7:29 PM

    Codewright, rysnc, cvs.

  • by eli on 11/14/2009, 7:15 PM

    expandrive for SFTP. People really still use regular FTP?

  • by vaksel on 11/14/2009, 6:10 PM

    can try notepad++

  • by FalcorTheDog on 11/14/2009, 8:20 PM

    Aptana

  • by aw3c2 on 11/14/2009, 7:02 PM

    jedit

  • by drhowarddrfine on 11/14/2009, 6:26 PM

    vim and ftp. Don't need anything else though FireFTP on Firefox is good. Don't have a suggestion for file management other than rsync.